By Soumyarendra Barik
Publication Date: 2026-02-16 01:40:00
Ahead of the AI Impact Summit that opens in Delhi today, Abhishek Singh, CEO, IndiaAI Mission, spoke on democratising artificial intelligence for the Global South and preparing India’s workforce for an AI-driven future. This session was moderated by Soumyarendra Barik, Assistant Editor, The Indian Express
Soumyarendra Barik: What are your expectations from the AI Impact Summit in India?
This is the first summit that is being held in the Global South and in a developing country. The previous three summits were held at Bletchley Park in the UK, Seoul in Korea, and last year we co-chaired the French AI Action Summit. Naturally, with the first summit in the Global South, the issue of democratising AI, involving the Global South in the way AI is shaped, developed, deployed and regulated becomes very important. The AI that we are using presently is such that it’s developed in and by a few countries and the majority of the world are just AI users. If the datasets are not inclusive, bias will be there in the output. The issue with regard to democratising AI resources in the form of datasets of compute, models, algorithms and applications becomes a key theme for the summit.
The second is to showcase India’s prowess in AI — the ability of Indian engineers, human resource, IT companies. The real value from AI will come in building agentic AI, integrating AI agents with legacy IT systems and what can be called AI transformation services.
India has been at the forefront of…
